


The Second Time Around

by ncfan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, And wreaks havoc on Sabine's emotional state, Being back at an Academy is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s03e04 The Antilles Extraction, Female Character of Color, Gen, Guilt, Introspection, Misgendering by authority figures, Missing Scene, POV Female Character, Space parents are good parents, Transphobia, character exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-04 00:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15830115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Sabine didn't have such a good time when she attended the Academy on Mandalore. She didn't have such a great time at Skystrike, either. [Expansion of 'The Antilles Extraction']





	The Second Time Around

**Author's Note:**

> [ **CN/TW** : Transphobia, misgendering of a trans character by authority figures, the awful background noise of living in a fascist state]

It took only a moment for the lump of ice, like a coal that had been left to freeze on the wastes of Hoth, to settle into Sabine’s stomach. It would be weeks before it really left her.

“I didn’t want to blindside you with this in the briefing,” Hera told her earnestly, the dull bronze-pinkish light of early morning on Atollon shading her skin a little dark. Her eyes were shadowed in a way that had nothing to do with the time of day. “We’ll have to talk about it again in a few minutes, but I wanted you to go into it _prepared_.”

‘Blindsided’ was a good word for it. Sabine stared at Hera, wishing she didn’t feel as blindsided as she did, but she couldn’t help it—she felt like the ground was falling away from her, and soon all that would be left was the void, and her with no way to avoid falling into it. She should have realized something like this was coming when Hera dragged her off to talk at a remote corner of the base, far from any line of traffic, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.

Sabine edged back onto solid ground, even if it meant she had to exist in the weak protest, “Don’t we usually send _Ezra_ on missions like this?”

It was a weak protest, something Sabine would never have considered using if she hadn’t had that horrible feeling of _falling_ trying to lodge its hooks on her ribs, so it didn’t come as any surprise to her that Hera shook her head, though it managed to send hope spiraling out further into the atmosphere. “The last time we sent Ezra to infiltrate an Imperial Academy, he was much younger, and was inserted in a class of very green recruits. It wasn’t anything strange for him not to know the Academy handbook by heart.”

“And Skystrike is different.” It wasn’t a question. Sabine knew what Skystrike was. She knew the kind of familiarity you had to have with Imperial protocol in general and the Academy handbook in particular to make it at Skystrike.

“Skystrike is different,” Hera agreed. “Ezra doesn’t know Imperial protocol well enough to successfully pass as a cadet, _and_ he’s gotten to be too recognizable. You’re less recognizable than he is—the least recognizable of all of us, really—and you have a better grasp of protocol and regulations. You’re a better fit for the age range of the cadets, and you’re a good enough pilot not to draw too much attention to yourself there. And Ezra…” Here, Hera hesitated, a line creasing into the smooth skin between her tattooed eyebrows, her mouth forming a thin line that Sabine couldn’t identify as either frustration or worry, though she thought it had the quality of both. “Honestly, Sabine, the way Ezra is right now…”

“He’d blow his cover before the end of the first day,” Sabine supplied, nodding grimly.

He was getting better. If Sabine noticed it, she knew Hera must have noticed it too. But he was getting better slowly, and recovery wasn’t linear. Sabine knew _exactly_ just how non-linear recovery was, and in a high-stress environment like Skystrike, it was easy to backslide (And not just for Ezra Bridger, though Sabine pushed that thought aside).

She was still a little pissed off with Kanan for not doing something sooner, if she was being honest—and _if_ she was being honest, she was a little pissed off with herself for not saying something to him about Ezra. She’d gotten Kanan to talk to Hera before he’d left for Malachor, hadn’t she? Why hadn’t she been able to get him to talk to Ezra, too? Why hadn’t she even tried?

Recovery didn’t work in a straight line. For anyone. That was all Sabine could figure.

“But you wouldn’t.”

Sabine had never told Hera all of what she was trained in when she had attended the Academy in truth. She’d never wanted to volunteer that information, and Hera had never asked (She had never been able to sort out whether this was Hera trying to accommodate her, or if it was Hera reasoning that she didn’t need to know if it wasn’t something that could endanger the group). But a collection of disparate skills could paint a picture all their own. Fluency with so many different languages, and many of those already fluent on her tongue by the time she’d first stepped on the _Ghost’s_ docking ramp. Slicing and uploading malicious computer programs, especially ones that involved surveillance. Skilled at figuring out just what the guard shifts were and where the best spot to sneak through the ranks were at shift rotation. Above-average information retention. Evidence of training to analyze information quickly in fluid, often chaotic situations, and to act on it just as quickly. Sabine knew just what picture it painted, and knew just as surely that every attempt she’d ever made to conceal it from Hera’s watchful gaze had failed.

She did not resent the idea that the Rebellion was calling upon her to be what the Empire had trained her to be. The Empire, Sabine thought, should rue the day it ever taught her those skills. It should rue a great many things.

Spite wasn’t enough to unstop her mouth, though, and Sabine looked at Hera with what she hoped wasn’t panic spilling across her skin.

“Sabine, if Fulcrum is right—“ if this Fulcrum agent was even on the up-and-up, something Sabine was rather less willing to take on faith than Hera “—there are cadets in the Skystrike Academy who want out.” Her voice was horribly gentle, without even the underlay of steel that usually existed in mission briefings, official or unofficial. “But they can’t get out without help.”

A part of her wanted to refuse even now, the part of her to whom thinking of the Academy still felt like falling and falling without even the promise of a sudden, bone-crushing _stop_ to bring an end to it. Another part of her was being transported inch by inch to the past. To memories she longed to exorcise (memories she could never exorcise), and the constant sick drum of terror that had been made of her heart, once upon a time.

“I’ve heard things about Skystrike’s security—and even if their standards have gotten lax recently, the location would be enough to make trying to escape rough. Anyone who tries to get out without someone there to extract them’ll be cut to pieces before they can even clear the atmosphere.” Sabine nodded, and nodded again to force herself into decisiveness. “Okay, Hera.”

Hera’s shoulders and lekku drooped, the only markers of her relief that Sabine was likely to see today. “Good,” she murmured, so soft that Sabine could almost have believed she was talking to herself—and maybe she was. “Good,” she said at a more normal volume. She caught Sabine’s eye, pinned her gaze beneath that horribly gentle gaze and in the shadow of that horribly gentle voice. “Sabine, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if there was someone else we could send. I know that whatever happened when you were at the Academy—“

“I know I had a rough time getting out.” And what led up to ‘getting out’ was too much the stuff of nightmares to be dragged out into the light of day, even if it was Hera doing the dragging. “And there were moments—“ here, Sabine paused, teetering between wanting to hold that piece of information in her throat where it could never be heard, and wanting to steer the conversation ever further from the Academy “—when I didn’t think I’d make it. I thought I was gonna be shot in the streets.” Or taken back alive, which was several orders of magnitude _worse_ —shackled to a desk, forced to repair what she had destroyed and spending the rest of her life churning out _new_ , with the alternative the death of a clan and a family who claimed her no longer, but would still pay the price for her non-compliance. “I don’t want anyone else to go through that if they don’t have to.”

When it came to the Empire, there were always things worse than death. Whoever the cadets who wanted out were, Sabine didn’t want them to have to learn that, either.

Later, when Sabine had stripped the dye out of her hair and was already feeling less like herself than she had since she’d grown comfortable enough with the family of her heart to stop wearing her armor to bed, Hera came to her again. Hands on Sabine’s shoulders and something bright and glistening in her eyes, she said, “Sabine, whatever happens, I’m proud of you for taking this mission. Remember that.”

She wasn’t feeling like herself, so she didn’t comment on the fact that it was usually Ezra Hera said things like that to. The lump of ice like a coal frozen on the wastes of Hoth had already found its way to the pit of her stomach, and Sabine held that warm moment in her heart for as long as she could, until its warmth fizzled out halfway on the transport ride to Skystrike.

-0-0-0-

The thing about an infiltration and extraction mission was that before you could do _anything_ , you had to figure out who it was you were trying to extract. And the thing about trying to defect from places like Skystrike was that if you had even a single brain cell still working in your skull, you did everything you could not to telegraph any dissatisfaction you might feel. Everything was riding on the instructors, the guards, and the other students not having any reason to think you might be unhappy with your current situation.

Sabine had no idea how long she was going to be in here. Uncertainty in mission parameters was something that set her teeth on edge as a rule. That sort of uncertainty when it came to an infiltration mission, the possibility that short-term could become long-term, made her feel as though every atom of her being was trying to split. The explosion would have been spectacular, certainly, but the fact that she wouldn’t be around to see it robbed it of any appeal it might have possessed.

The first day was like dragging bare feet against floor studded with broken glass, and she couldn’t even scream to relieve the pressure. She felt naked without her armor and her hair dye, for all that the black Skystrike uniform (such a deep, dense black; Sabine wondered sometimes what sort of dye they used to keep it from fading after repeated washes, wondered what made them think perpetually-crisp-black uniforms were worth such expensive dyes, wondered what ever made the Empire decide to be a massive drain on resources) covered every inch of her skin from the neck down. Once she signaled Kanan and Ezra that she’d gotten in, she had to ditch the comm she’d smuggled into the Academy—she couldn’t risk a monitor coming across it during barrack inspections—and it was barely an hour before radio silence was dragging at her heels like a ball and chain.

Her skin was awash with goosebumps and every time the fabric of her uniform shifted even slightly, it sent waves of sick sensation coursing up and down her body. With every sharp voice telling her to go down this hallway or that, admonishing her to stand up straight, the general snaps denouncing idle chatter in the halls, it got harder and harder to keep from snapping back. To keep from telling the instructors ( _they’re all liars, they talk only to deceive, they only want to use you_ —she stared irritably at her ‘classmates’— _don’t you see that?_ ) exactly what she thought of them and the litany of rules that left scarcely enough room to breathe, and no room at all to think. She thought of the cadets who’d burn out or die (or worse, be taken alive) if she got kicked out for insubordination, and kept her tongue.

Finally, insult of insults, the cot in the barracks that for now was both bed and home was impossible to sleep on. The sheets were scratchy, the mattress was roughly the thickness of her fabricated ID card, the slats underneath the mattress dug into her spine, and the noises her roommates made when they slept assaulted her ears.

The thing was, the mattress of her bunk back on the _Ghost_ wasn’t a lot thicker, and the hardness of the support structure beneath was always present. And the sheets were rough, there was no denying that; they were old and whoever was on laundry duty usually had no choice but to take them to the cheapest laundromat in the area, and wash them with the cheapest detergent they could get their hands on, and these things did not lend themselves to soft sheets. But she’d never had that much falling asleep in that bunk. Even in the beginning, when she was still half-expecting the door to slide open and the muzzle of a blaster to plant itself on her chest, she’d had an easier time sleeping.

It was the other people in the room with her. That had to be it. Even when she was sleeping, there was still the possibility for scrutiny, for _surveillance_. Sabine rolled so that she faced the wall, and drew a sharp, shuddering breath. She might have been covered up from the neck down, but she still felt naked.

-0-0-0-

The second day saw Sabine start the effort of integrating herself into the student body. What she really needed to do, she knew, was watch her classmates, and watch them very closely. The need for haste was paramount, so she wouldn’t have time to get a really thorough feel for what they acted like in low-stress situations. But Sabine remembered her lessons (was remembering them better and better in this environment, like shadows settling over her and trying to convince her they were actually her flesh), and she knew there was value to talking with them. The cadets looking to defect had to be trying to keep a low profile, but sometimes people revealed more than they meant to when they talked.

There were limitations to the sort of chatting up of her classmates that Sabine could actually do. Idle chatter was frowned upon in the classrooms. Mealtimes were spaced far enough apart that everyone was too hungry to do anything but eat once they got the mess hall—a description that fit Sabine too, unfortunately (And the fact that there were instructors and guards in there watching them didn’t exactly make easy having the kind of conversations she needed to be having). If cadets were caught loitering in the halls, they were told in no uncertain terms to break it up and head on to wherever they were supposed to be going.

And the barracks were segregated by sex, with male and female cadets _strongly_ discouraged from visiting the other’s barracks. In a place where, much like most other Imperial facilities, sex ratios skewed heavily male. That didn’t help.

(Segregated by sex, but not, Sabine suspected, by gender. There was a cadet she’d spotted at the far end of the female barracks when she’d first arrived. They looked to be a little older than her, maybe a year or two; they had a deeper voice than was usual for a woman, and a very flat chest. They also looked as ill at ease in the female barracks as Sabine felt, wringing their hands and standing very stiffly, as though they expected the floor to give under them. Maybe this was dissatisfied cadet; they certainly looked anxious enough to be. But there were plenty of other reasons why this particular cadet might be looking anxious, and Sabine couldn’t risk approaching them, not unless they were absolutely sure.

Still, when she caught their eye, she smiled sympathetically their way, and didn’t have to force the sympathy up at all. They didn’t smile back. They just sat down on their bunk, holding their hands in their lap and staring off at nothing.)

Sabine wound up doing more listening than talking, though the part of her mind that didn’t chafe horribly over restricted movement admitted that what she was learning was, in a sense, useful.

“Goran’s okay so long as you follow his instructions,” Kaylar, a cadet who’d already been here for a couple of months, told the girls who’d gathered round her bunk, “and Kallian’s a pushover. But Skerris is a hardass—a _real_ hardass, I mean. You gotta watch what you say around him. Watch your posture around him. Watch how loud you _breathe_ around him.”

“Is he _really_ that bad?” Nadia, a human girl, asked skeptically (Though it was only so much time spent outside of the Empire’s ranks that had Sabine making the distinction—everyone here was human, the cadets, the instructors, the guards, the janitorial staff, and if any of them had so much as a drop of non-human blood, it didn’t come out on the surface).

Kaylar leaned back on her arms, looking Nadia up and down with a gleam in her eyes. “Let me guess: you’re one of the ones who got told that Skystrike’s reputation is exaggerated?” She didn’t wait for Nadia’s response before continuing, “Well, it’s not. Not even a little bit. This place is rough, and you _will_ get chewed out if you put a toe out of line in front of the wrong people.”

Nadia took a step back, noticeably abashed.

Herself, Sabine felt it was time she insert herself into the conversation (Better to get established as a potential conversation partner as soon as possible). She slid past the girl in front of her, nodding apologetically as she did so, and fixed Kaylar in what she hoped successfully passed for an excitedly impatient stare. “Yeah, everybody here’s really strict; we know that. What _I_ wanna know is when they’re gonna let us _fly_. We were stuck in orientation all _day_ today.”

And maybe Sabine was a little impatient. Time stuck in the pilot seat of a TIE was time she couldn’t watch any of the cadets, but she’d never really flown a TIE before (the one on Lothal she’d painted didn’t really count; Hera had done all the flying there), and it would be a good chance to see if the Empire had installed any upgrades since then. Probably not (they were cheap as hell, after all; why spend time making TIEs something close to durable when you can just throw a hundred of them at a problem and maybe have some pilots still breathing once you’re done?), but you never know.

Kaylar smiled up at her. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Ria. They gotta double-check you’re really Skystrike material first. You earn your place here twice before you ever get behind the controls of a fighter.”

“Hey, whatever they wanna throw at me, I’m ready.”

“Yeah, you think you are, but most of the cadets here who flunk out flunk _before_ they get as far as the TIEs. Hey, Ximar?” Kaylar called suddenly to the cadet sitting on their bunk at the far end of the female barracks, the one who looked every bit as uncomfortable as Sabine felt. “What’s eating you?”

Ximar’s head snapped up from their maybe-examination of the floor. Their brown eyes were slightly bloodshot, the skin around the eyes tinted ever so slightly darker than the rest of their tan face. “What… What do you mean?” Sabine had only heard them speak a couple of times, and that in the mess hall, but listening to Ximar speak here, with no one speaking over them, only confirmed what she’d noticed earlier: deep voice, deeper than any of the girls here.

Kaylar tilted her head slightly to one side, her short black curls bouncing as she did so. “Come on; you look like someone just told you your mother died.”

‘Mother’ made Ximar flinch, and the realization that twelve pairs of eyes were now trained firmly on their face didn’t seem to help at all. They hunched their shoulders and folded their legs up on the cot, as if they were trying to fold up on themselves like a telescope. “I’m not… They said… I… I wasn’t allowed to bring my testosterone shots into Skystrike,” they muttered at last.

All at once, the center of gravity in the room shifted. The girls herded over to where Ximar was still sitting, still apparently trying to shrink into nothingness, or so it seemed. It occurred to Sabine halfway over that they ought to give Ximar a bit more space, but she was caught up in the flow of movement, and trying to back out would have looked weird. Looking weird very much ran counter to what she was trying to do here.

Kaylar plopped down on the bed next to Ximar. Another girl, pale and blonde and delicate-featured, whose name Sabine hadn’t caught but whose accent was unmistakably upper-class Coruscanti (and only time would tell as to whether she’d gotten in here on merit or connections), sat down on Ximar’s other side. At this point, Sabine started to open her mouth, because _really_ , boundaries were a thing, but the blonde girl opened her mouth first.

“Why ever not?” she asked. “I have Asrider’s, and they let me bring my painkillers. Why would your medication be a problem?”

Ximar shrugged miserably. “They said it wasn’t medically necessary, and I only found out they’d dumped it after the transport left orbit, so it wasn’t like I could get _off_.”

What followed nearly left Sabine reeling, though given the way thing had been playing out up to this, it shouldn’t have. The barracks practically erupted in sympathetic remarks and disgusted exclamations. “I’m so sorry, that’s awful.” “Ugh, bureaucracy is the _worst_. They did that to my cousin, too; he got to feeling like hell—and that’s only the _physical_ —and nobody who could’ve authorized his meds gave a fuck. He wound up missing so much class he flunked out.” “If you get to feeling really bad, let us know, okay?”

An unexpected burst of warmth made the lump of ice in Sabine’s stomach thaw a little. But then she remembered what exactly this would all amount to—her mind jumped years back to Sundari, to similar situations, to exactly what sympathy and support had amounted to in the long run—and the lump froze back harder and colder than before. The instructors didn’t care, the bureaucracy didn’t care, and within a few years, most of the cadets so sympathetic in the here and now wouldn’t care, either. The Empire was good at teaching people not to care, to view themselves and others as cogs in a machine whose only value, the only way they could ever have value, was in the work they did. If they didn’t do that work, chew them up and spit them out, and don’t ask why. _Never_ ask why.

She’d forgotten that. Only for a split-second, but still. The ice settled into shame in her gut.

“Is there any kind of black market here?” Sabine asked Kaylar very quietly.

And maybe the spur of shame was making her a little reckless. Calculated risks were a thing in infiltration missions, sure, but this hadn’t been calculated, and in the interest of identifying and extracting the defectors, it wasn’t really… She didn’t regret it, though.

The outburst that could have followed such a question never came. Kaylar considered her for a moment before shaking her head. “You’ve seen this place. No civilian personnel—even the cleaning crew are stormtroopers. We don’t get a whole lot of ships coming in and out, and surveillance is thorough enough that there isn’t anywhere for a black market to thrive.”

“I wouldn’t take testosterone I didn’t get from a pharmacy, anyways,” Ximar mumbled. “You can’t trust back alley stuff.”

Sabine, many years into a life where “back alley stuff” was all she had access to as regards to a great many things, kept her mouth shut.

Kaylar clapped Ximar firmly on the back. “Come on, man, let’s go to medbay. The pencil-pushers might not think your testosterone is “medically necessary,” but a massive hormone crash _can’t_ be good for you. Bet the doctors feel the same way.”

“And if you want, maybe we can talk to someone about transferring you to the boy’s barracks.” So long as they were putting way too much faith in the idea of senior Imperials showing some vestige of basic decency.

Ximar had brightened a little at the idea of going to the medical bay, but he—Sabine supposed, however tentatively, that that might be right—shook his head ‘no’ at her suggestion. “Thanks, Ria, but if it’s a choice between my medication and sleeping in the right barracks, I’d rather the testosterone.” He smiled half-heartedly. “I don’t think I’ll be allowed both.”

They left, and Sabine reflected on something else about the Empire that she’d half-forgotten, but was remembering now like it had been inked on her skin: how they could, despite being a massive beast with massive pools of resources, make you feel so grateful for scraps. She remembered that, remembered how she’d hanged on a word of approval and been pathetically grateful for even the slightest bit of acknowledgment. She remembered, and wished she could forget.

-0-0-0-

The third day marked the first real day of class, and here was where Ezra really would have started having trouble, presuming he wouldn’t have already been floundering.

Hera had had her blaster trained on the bull’s eye when she talked about Ezra’s knowledge of Imperial protocol and regulation. He’d skated by in the Lothal Academy because the crop of cadets there were all so new, and not expected to be well-versed—besides which, it sounded like the instructors were primarily testing the students for Force-sensitivity. And standards on Lothal tended to be fairly lax in general, at least in comparison to what Sabine had been used to.

She was now attending classes at Skystrike, and they were so steeped in protocol and regulation that Sabine was probably going to be muttering them in her sleep by the time this was over. Sabine had always been the go-to person on the team when they needed to know a certain piece of trivia about Imperial regs. Part of it was that she remembered entirely too well what she’d been taught at the Academy. Part of it was that it always paid for someone to know details like average time for guard shifts, average contents of a backpack, basic tactics. _And_ she’d skimmed the handbook again before coming here. Without all of that, Sabine suspected she would have fast joined the ranks of the slowly growing group of students who couldn’t seem to do anything but earn their instructor’s ire.

It was hard to people-watch here. If you wanted to keep up, you needed to have your attention primarily focused on the instructor, and watching your classmates for too long carried with it the risk of being accused of _cheating_. The instructor thinking she was cheating would, at best, get Sabine a chewing out, and at worst get her sent to the commandant’s office for a conversation that would risk breaking her cover completely.

She was picking up on a couple of things, though. One of the girls from the barracks winced every time an instructor called on her, and a few of the male cadets were way too fidgety for hotshot pilots (in training) who had, at least in theory, ‘arrived.’ Maybe they just had anxiety. Maybe it was something else.

The thing was, when you had a student who consistently answered questions correctly, the instructors tended to take notice. And Sabine was remembering something about herself, something she’d never been able to fully exercise living on the _Ghost_ : that competitive streak of hers, something which never really reared its head except in academic situations.

She answered questions when called upon. She didn’t pretend not to know the answers. The first nod that came her way sent a spark igniting dully in her chest. The first faint, almost rueful smile shot her way by the instructor fanned that spark into a flame. The faintly envious looks she could feel her classmates fixing her with made her skin prickle with something she would later identify as excitement. A murmured “Very good” made her positively glow with pride.

The glow shriveled into ice-coldness the moment the instructor’s gaze left her and Sabine remembered what she was doing here.

She was quiet for the rest of class, and mercifully the instructor seemed to think he’d focused on ‘Ria Talla’ enough for one day, turning his attention instead to the other students. Her heart raced, her pulse jumping so erratically she thought she might be sick.

-0-0-0-

Either very late on the third day, or very early on the fourth:

Her dreams were full of blood and ashes and cold, staring eyes and she woke expecting to hear voices speaking Mando’a. Expecting the reek of burning flesh to assault her nostrils and the roof of her mouth. She woke in a cold, dim room, the slats of her bed digging into her spine. It was quiet, aside from the soft breathing (and occasional snores) of the people who shared the barracks with her.

Her stomach lurched, a wave of sick warmth washed over her, and Sabine hurled herself towards the door to the bathrooms, in no state to care if the others woke from her stumbling.

Once she’d emptied her stomach and finished spitting into the toilet, licking her lips sickly and wondering weakly if she could get up now without falling over, Sabine would be grateful that whoever had designed Skystrike had decided to make the girl’s barracks and the girl’s bathrooms adjoining rooms. Granted, someone seemed to be taking a shower right now in one of the shower stalls, but hopefully they hadn’t heard her puking her guts out over the water shooting out of the showerhead (And here she was a little envious; the _Ghost_ only had sonic showers, and the same went for the corvettes).

Sabine leaned back against the plasteel wall of the bathroom stall she’d ducked into and took a few deep, gasping breaths, mopping at the sweat dripping down her face and wondering if she might not want to shower again before morning. Her legs, she’d decided, felt too much like jelly to risk standing up. Face-planting right into the toilet bowl would have just been the lowest point of what was shaping up to be a crappy night. The clammy plasteel wall of the stall and the just-as-clammy ceramic tiles seeped into her skin through her clothes. A shuddering sigh tore from her mouth.

She needed out. She needed to find the cadets who wanted out, form a plan to get them out, and get as far away from this place as she possibly could. She’d vomited over and over again until all that came up was stomach acid, she should have been exhausted, but a tense, vicious energy raced under her skin. She was tired; she was wide awake. She needed out. This place was…

Sabine waited a few more minutes before risking standing up. Her legs wobbled a little under her, but the test of their strength reached a more satisfying conclusion than the test of the strength of her _mind_ , and she hobbled over to the sink with ‘Ria Talla’ written in the name slot without falling.

The mirror… She was trying to avoid looking into the mirror. She knew what a mess she must look like, bloodshot eyes and sallow skin and a line of dried bile streaked down her chin. But when Sabine, very much against her will, found her gaze drawn to the mirror, she didn’t register any of that. Her eyes were drawn to her hair, disheveled and sticking out at odd angles. It wasn’t the absence of dye that jarred her. It was the length. She was looking at it, and kept expecting to see hair long enough to bind behind her head.

 _Maybe I’m not as awake as I thought I was_.

She wasn’t in Sundari anymore. She wasn’t a cadet anymore. She was an infiltrator at Skystrike, trying to locate cadets who had made the same decision she made so many years ago, and ensure their trip out wouldn’t be the absolute hell hers had been. That should have been a comfort.

Sabine was clutching at the rim of the sink, eyeing the bottle of mouthwash unenthusiastically, when the occupied shower stall’s door swung open—she hadn’t even heard the occupant turn the water off, but apparently they were done.

“Woops, sorry!” It was Ximar’s voice, high with something close to panic. “Didn’t think anyone else was up.”

She wasn’t looking at him, but squeezed her eyes shut anyways. “It’s not a problem.” Her voice sounded like what Sabine imagined a voice would sound like if you threw it in a meat grinder. “Just let me know when I can open my eyes.”

Eyes shut was a little easier. Eyes shut and blessed darkness made Sabine realize how harsh the lighting in the bathroom had been on her eyes, how it had stabbed at them like knives. When Ximar told her it was okay to open her eyes again, Sabine frankly wished he’d just gone back into the barracks and left her to keep her eyes shut in peace. It wasn’t like there would have been anyone awake to see her acting weird. As it was, she opened her eyes and hoped Ximar wouldn’t think she was drunk or something.

Not that Sabine had any idea how she would have gotten her hands on alcohol here.

“I’m sorry,” Ximar said again, though without the panic that had grasped at his voice so. “I really didn’t think there’d be anyone up this late. I usually shower after everyone’s gone to bed; I…” He looked down at the ground. Quickly, “I just prefer to shower after everyone’s gone to bed.”

“Hey, I didn’t plan to be up this late,” Sabine told him wryly. “It just sort of happened.”

Ximar combed his wet hair while Sabine finally chanced the mouthwash (Taking it now only confirmed what she’d suspected earlier: alcohol-based, _ugh_ ). They were silent, though Sabine wasn’t certain it was a companionable silence so much as it was a “don’t wake the people in the next room” silence. Sabine hadn’t asked Ximar how his trip to the medical bay had gone—it wasn’t her place—but he’d seemed so happy since coming back that she couldn’t help but hope that, for once in the history of the Empire, basic decency had prevailed.

“You okay?” Ximar asked suddenly.

“What?”

“I said, are you okay? No offense, Ria, but you look a bit… Sorry, but you look like death warmed over.”

Sabine laughed wryly; the laugh could not sound less like one of hers. “Thanks.” She settled quickly on the simplest lie available to her: “I’m okay. I just don’t think supper agreed with me all that much.”

Ximar made a face. “Yeah, I thought the meat tasted a little off. You wanna go to medbay?”

“I’ll be fine; just need to sleep it off.”

Eventually, Ximar headed back into the dark barracks, leaving Sabine alone under the harsh fluorescent lights and the shadows that gathered like cobwebs at the corners of the room.

Being here was like watching a horror vid. No, being here was a combination of watching a train wreck in slow motion and being trapped _in_ a horror vid, except this time Sabine was one of the extras, watching the stars march unknowingly towards the monster that waited for them. No way to warn them what was coming, no way to derail the plot before it could start accelerating too quickly to stop.

Sabine didn’t think any of the cadets here thought they’d ever encounter anything more difficult than an impossible-to-please superior officer. Their heads were full of dreams of glory ( _Like mine was_ ). None of them were prepared for the day the Empire demanded their souls in payment for that glory.

-0-0-0-

Seventh day:

Something was bound to give. Skystrike was a pressure cooker at the best of times, and eventually, something had to give. Sabine had gone into the simulation painfully aware that she was on the clock and time was running short. Seven days into this and she still hadn’t found the would-be defectors. The corvette and its crew couldn’t stay in its hiding place forever; they’d stocked enough fuel to last a while, but their supply wasn’t inexhaustible.

Sometimes, when events are moving more slowly than anticipated, it’s necessary for a spy to try and speed them up a bit. In Sabine’s case, that would have meant causing a very particular kind of scene. A calculated risk, but if it meant identifying the defectors, it was worth the risk.

That was before the simulation. There was still a scene afterwards, but every thought of calculation was gone from her head.

Something was bound to give. That ‘something’ wound up being Sabine herself.

In a situation where Imperial regulations conflict with an order given to you by a superior officer, do you follow the regs, or do you follow orders? Everyone in the Imperial military would be faced with this test eventually. Navy or infantry, Grand admiral or lieutenant, no one could escape that moment of truth. It was, after all, the test of whether or not you’d been successfully made over into an apathetic little drone who didn’t care about anything or anyone and never thought for yourself.

The last time Sabine had been given this test, she’d failed. She’d failed the test and been praised for it as if she hadn’t just broken her honor to pieces and signed her soul away. And now she was back here again, being put through the test again, and maybe nobody else cared enough about simulated people to risk Goran’s wrath doing the right thing, but the moment of truth had come again and no one else _cared._ It was _wrong_ , all of it—everything about this place was wrong, like a sick beast infecting everything it touched, her stomach felt so ice-sickly cold that Sabine thought for sure she was going to be sick again. The Academies were slaughterhouses that produced little wind-up soldiers with gears where their hearts and their brains should have been, and no one _cared_.

It occurred to her only dimly that the fact that Wedge, alone of all the cadets, had grabbed her arm and actually tried to warn her off of talking the way she was, was significant. But him and Hobbie and Rake, they turned out to be pretty bad at keeping their own feelings on the down-low soon enough. Sabine was just embarrassed she’d slipped so much that it had taken overhearing a whispered conversation in the hallway to solidify her suspicions.

-0-0-0-

Events moved quickly after that. So quickly, in fact, that trying fully to make sense of them made Sabine’s head spin until the act of thinking was tainted with nausea. Rake had been killed. Sabine got into a fistfight with a planetary governor, which admittedly was not something she ever expected to happen in her life. Agent Kallus was bizarrely helpful. They’d escaped eventually, but one man down, and Sabine’s promise of a safe escape was, for Rake, irrevocably broken. She was back on Atollon, hot and dusty and dry. She still felt cold.

“So how did you know it was us?” Wedge asked her one evening.

Her own bad timing and lack of understanding about the situation they were in had gotten Rake killed. That didn’t seem to matter as much to Wedge and Hobbie as it really should have, because they still looked at her like something between sister and savior, and sought out her company rather more often than she had thought they would. It wasn’t unpleasant, really—it was nice to have more people around Chopper Base who were close to her age, something Sabine hadn’t really appreciated until they were actually there—but she felt Rake’s absence. Just one more failure in a long list of failures, but Wedge and Hobbie didn’t seem to see his shadow there like she did.

“Aside from you guys discussing your exit strategy in the middle of a hallway?” Sabine returned dryly. She didn’t gibe any further once she’d gotten a pair of sheepish grins. Instead, she folded her arms around her chest (and it felt so good to feel armor there instead of just cloth) and leaned back a little. “I kept looking,” she said softly. “I kept looking for someone who looked like they felt as if they didn’t belong there. I saw plenty of people who looked uncomfortable, but I couldn’t risk it unless I was sure. So, since nobody was asking questions, I watched for the way people reacted when I _did_.”

It was a lie, of course, and it didn’t make her feel better the way she thought it would. Wedge and Hobbie couldn’t tell the difference, and that didn’t make her feel better, either. She still felt cold.

-0-0-0-

Sabine wasn’t certain what it meant that she was seeking company out in her own disquiet, rather than burrowing ever deeper into solitude. She knew it wasn’t _normal_ ; she didn’t like for people to see her at anything other than her best, and generally, people tended not to like what they saw when she wasn’t at her best, so it all balanced out. (She wasn’t any more comfortable with attempts at consolation than she was with criticism). Better to work out whatever was wrong in private, and have her game face back on by the time she had to go out and face the world.

Weirder still that it was Kanan she was heading towards. Sure, Kanan was family, but if you were to write up a list of things Kanan Jarrus and Sabine Wren did together on a regular basis, anything resembling ‘emotional labor’ was not going to be found there. Any time ‘emotions’ entered into something they were doing together, there was a 50-50 chance they’d be driving each other up the wall within about five minutes, even if they were in complete agreement about whatever the issue of the moment might be.

Still, ‘not on a regular basis’ didn’t mean ‘never.’

These days, Kanan opted to meditate outside a lot more than he used to, and tended to meditate pretty close to the sensor markers marking the boundary between the base and the krykna that wanted to eat them all. Maybe it was the fact that Phoenix Squadron had the planet all to themselves. Maybe it was something to do with the way Kanan’s perception of the galaxy around him had changed after he was blinded.

 _Maybe it was just easier to avoid Ezra for months on end this way_ , a thin, edged voice in the back of her head suggested, but Sabine put it aside. It was… Maybe it would just be easier to try and leave it in the past. And after all, she’d never tried to get Kanan to talk to Ezra.

Her body moving with a confidence her mind didn’t share, Sabine walked lightly over to where Kanan sat, and sat down a couple of feet away, facing the same direction.

He didn’t register her presence at first—with his face covered from the nose up, Sabine couldn’t tell if he was ignoring her, or if he was just that absorbed in his meditation. Without a good look at his eyes—even milky and unseeing, they still gave away a fair bit—and his eyebrows, she couldn’t really guess. She’d gotten used to deciphering his facial expressions while having a _full_ view of his face. Now, it was like he had a different face entirely.

…But that was pretty much her own fault. It was her and Rex who’d fashioned that mask for him in the first place.

After a few minutes of a gentle breeze blowing dust in Sabine’s face (though never in her eyes or up her nose, which was strange, though not her primary concern), Kanan remarked, “Does your hair dye always smell this strong?”

Sabine shrugged. “New brand.” And she didn’t bother pointing out that given that she was going with a lighter color than usual, she had to add more layers to get the exact shade she wanted.

“Oh, is _that_ what it is?” He sounded a little might he like laugh, though the hint of laughter melted out of his voice like snow melting in the sun. “And here I thought you’d just used the whole bottle.”

“I don’t use _that_ much.” Not even when she was trying to maintain pale lavender on black hair.

“Sabine, I smelled you from six feet away. You’re using a lot.”

Sabine shrugged again, a little more defensively this time, even though she couldn’t hear any real bite in his voice. “Well, it’s not like I can afford good dye; everybody here’s hard up for credits. Cheap dye smells stronger to start with, and you have to use more to get the kind of color you could get from a higher-quality dye.”

“Is that what it is?” Kanan’s voice was softer this time, and he gave a huffing laugh under his breath. “Sooo… How are you doing?”

For all that she’d come out here deliberately seeking company that could silence the disquiet rattling around inside of her, Sabine still jerked back a little from such a question. “Fine.” Reflex; it had been reflex for years now. “Why do you ask?”

“You seem troubled.” The words carried an odd weight to them, and Sabine wondered irritably, not for the first time, when Kanan had decided to become the archetypal spooky Jedi. Even if he only did it part-time and was still the same person he’d been for as long as Sabine had known him at all other times, it was still. Well, it was archetypal Jedi spookiness. It was off-putting.

But at least it meant that Sabine didn’t have to start this part of the conversation.

“……I lost one of the pilots I was supposed to be getting out of Skystrike,” she said flatly. For all that thinking about it, thinking about Rake, was like trying to think through wire mesh, she couldn’t seem to find any emotions to put in her voice. They just… wouldn’t work.

Kanan nodded. “I was there, Sabine. I know.” He sighed. “It’s rough, Sabine, but you can’t always prevent losses like that. Sometimes, no one can.”

She should have been able to. She should have realized the Empire was setting a trap with that flight exercise, or she should have been able to get them a little closer to the corvette before Skystrike activated the TIEs’ kill switches, or she should have been able to find a way from stopping them from activating the kill switches at all. _I should have known better_.

“It’s nice when you can tell yourself that,” and if she sounded a little tart even to her own ears, she couldn’t stop it, “but I don’t think that matters much to _Rake_.”

The sigh that burst from Kanan’s mouth was louder this time, exasperation pitching his voice a bit high. “Yeah, well, my point is, you can’t spend your whole life beating yourself up for things outside your control.”

Sabine raised an eyebrow, smirked a little. “ _You’re_ telling _me_ that?”

That sigh turned into a barking laugh. “Takes one to know one, kid.”

Sabine wondered when the little expressions of familiarity, the little expressions of “I know you and I know what you’re like” ceased to make her feel naked, and started making her feel a little safer. She’d never really thought about it before. Maybe it had been years ago. That would be nice.

Kanan tilted his head a little, and veered right back into archetypal spooky Jedi territory. “But that’s not the only thing that’s bothering you, is it?” he asked softly.

Sabine stiffened, but let the stiffness out in a long, slow breath that seemed to let out more air that she’d thought her lungs were capable of holding. “No,” she admitted, the syllable dragging over her tongue like it was weighted down with lead, “it’s not.”

“Sabine…” Kanan shifted his weight on his haunches before giving up with that position and crossing his legs under him so he could cross his arms over his chest more easily. “I get the impression you had a bad time when you attended the Academy on Mandalore…”

It took a moment for the words to sink in; they wanted nothing more than to batter at her skin until it was raw, but eventually, they did sink in, and when they did, something in Sabine’s chest went very hard, and her stomach went even colder than it had been in Skystrike. “Hera told you,” she said flatly.

“What? No. Sabine, if you told Hera something in confidence, trust me, she’s _never_ gonna tell anyone else. Not unless she thinks it could endanger the team. Prying secrets out of her is like trying to get the damn krykna to stop trying to eat us.” And saying stuff like that really clashed with the ‘spooky Jedi’ image, so Sabine didn’t say anything that could have discouraged him. “You just… you’ve never acted like you had a good time there.”

“Kanan, if I’d had a good time there, I wouldn’t _be_ here.” Where had this sudden spike of shame come from? Her voice was choking with it; she felt like she might drown in it. Shame wasn’t a constant part of her life anymore; it wasn’t one of the things that constantly lingered just beyond the surface of her mind, though Sabine would admit it didn’t take much to call it up, sometimes. It should have taken more than that to draw it to the forefront.

He shrugged. “You never know. Life’s full of surprises.” Then, he brought his hand down on her shoulder, and Sabine winced in spite of herself. “And this is not helping at all, is it?”

“Well, look at it this way—you’re not making things _worse_.”

Another laugh, though this one pitched high and a little squeaky with sheepishness. “Yeahhh, that’s not anything to be proud of. Just…” He sighed through his nose, nostrils flaring sharply. “Sometimes, we have missions where everything goes off with a hitch, and you get victory without any loss. But most of the time, even if you manage to do what you set out to do, you’re gonna have loss. You’re gonna lose something. Or someone.”

“I know that, Kanan,” Sabine retorted, though without any real heat. “I’m not new at this.”

He squeezed her shoulder. “Yeah, I know you _know_ that. What I’m trying to tell you is you’ve gotta learn to _accept_ it, too.”

“What, just _accept_ that people are gonna die every time we head out and just… be _okay_ with that?” _Now_ there some heat in her voice.

There came that very particular huffy sigh that Sabine heard sometimes when Ezra was having a problem with a lesson Kanan was trying to teach him. Just as with Ezra, there was firmness but no sharpness in his voice as he told her, “No, Sabine, that’s _not_ what I’m telling you. What I’m telling you is that if you want to move forward, you have to accept the losses. Accept that they happened, accept that they can’t be undone, accept that they’re not going to stop you from doing what you need to do, all of that. Can you do that?”

And because she couldn’t say ‘yes’ without the lie choking her for sure, “I can try.” And she found she meant it.

To Sabine’s surprise, Kanan actually chuckled at that. “I could tell you something I heard way too much when I was a kid, but if Ezra didn’t swallow it, I know _you’re_ not going to.” He started to get back to his feet, dusting off his trousers and rolling his shoulders. “Come on, let’s head back to the _Ghost_. I’ve got watch duty soon, and I know you’re supposed to be going over the inventory with AP-5.”

As they headed back to the main part of the base, Kanan said, just a little tautly, “Sabine… I know you’re upset about Rake, but honestly, I’m just glad they didn’t pick your TIE to shoot down. If it’s a choice between a stranger and you, I choose you every time.”

The lump of ice in her stomach thawed a little. She knew. They were family, after all.


End file.
